Community Members stand behind YGB!
In the aftermath of Paul Heenan’s shooting on November 9, 2012, a group of residents from the Madison community, former and current law enforcement officers, representatives from social service agencies, mental health experts and academics formed a group that calls itself the Community Response Team. We were deeply shaken by the police culture, policy and training that led to the actions taken that night and that continued throughout the year. We worked tirelessly to examine the culture, motives, policies, management, and incentives that led, not only to Paul Heenan’s fatal shooting, but to the damaging and dysfunctional communication from the Madison Police Department (MPD) to the community after his death. Two more fatal, officer-involved shootings during the next several months strengthened our drive to identify and address systemic problems within and around the MPD.
Sadly, just over two months into 2015, our community is again grieving the loss of yet another unarmed resident killed at the hands of police. Only this time, state violence has ended the life of a young, unarmed Black teenager. What’s his name? Tony Terrell Robinson. Another mother’s child has been taken from her and the pain seems bottomless. A reenergized Community Response Team, enlarging its ranks with blue-collar workers, teachers, retirees, students, East Madison neighbors, committed social justice activists and more, urgently believes things must change. We agree we must prevent this from happening again.
A bright spot within all of this tragedy is the emergence of the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition, an energized group of youthful thought-leaders who are amplifying the ideas of people from whom we hear least in our community. These are the voices of LGBTQ, Black, and Brown residents: those touched personally by the criminal justice system, those who have known homelessness, have known food insecurity, have felt the hand of state violence on their necks. These human rights champions are the voices of some of the most impacted – and among those to whom we look for leadership within our community.
The Community Response Team is offering its resources and strong support for the leadership of the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition. We share their concerns and stand behind them in making their demands. We hope our efforts complement theirs and that together we can move our criminal justice system, our government and our community to higher ground where education, safety, health and prosperity are equitable opportunities for all.
In order to provide this quality of life to all residents, we believe that the MPD must overhaul several policies starting with its policy on how and when to use force. The present standard – individual fear (Graham v. Connor) – cannot be the
standard of a professional, democratic police agency. It is far too low. Until there is actual data to show that officers incur greater injuries or fatalities due to increased restraint, the present standard must be raised and training adjusted
accordingly if we are a community committed to the moral idea that Black lives, and indeed all lives, truly matter. Leadership must be proactive and any new system must be carefully monitored in order to be held accountable. This is what
professional police do in a free and democratic society. This is what our community expects and demands and we will accept nothing less. We are committed to helping MPD meet this high calling.
Additionally, the following questions and recommendations formulated and delivered to prominent Madison leadership over a year ago remain outstanding and, to our minds, largely unanswered:
• How will the MPD Chief ensure that the community has an influential role in the organization? By what mechanism or agent will the department receive ongoing input from the community to improve current protocol or policies? The MPD is not a person that needs to be protected. We believe it is the moral responsibility of the MPD is to serve and protect the community.
• Specifically, how will the MPD Chief learn what the community believes should be the moral criteria for the use of deadly force vs. the minimal bar set by the legal criteria? How will the MPD Chief ensure those moral criteria are
being met by the department?
• How will the MPD Chief address the great disparity of arrest rates between our community’s white population and its populations of color, recognizing that it cannot be the natural order of things and that racial profiling leads to
corrosive dehumanization and a burdensome overexposure to the criminal justice system in our Black and Brown neighborhoods?
• How will the department enhance its empathy to see people not as a statistical set of characteristics, but instead, as human beings?
• How will MPD improve upon crisis intervention training to ensure that the quality of the bulk of the work that officers do in our community gets the highest priority and attention?
• How will the MPD Chief shape the culture of the MPD to ensure that respect for diversity, both in the workplace and in the community, is a top priority?
• How will the same culture support the possibility that it takes more courage not to pull the trigger than to pull the trigger in the troublesome deadly force issues that took place in 2012 and 2013, and now again, in 2015?
• How will the MPD Chief ensure that MPD officers receive the attention, evaluation and training they need to support them emotionally, as well as physically?
• How will the department flag problem officers and provide them the help they need before they can become factors in deadly force encounters?
• How will the MPD Chief ensure that communication between 911 dispatch and police officers happens with the highest possible fidelity, meaning that communication and training between dispatch and other departments – including attendance at briefings – is prioritized? And how will the MPD Chief ensure that effective analysis of system failure happens when
mistakes in communication lead to negative outcomes in the field?
• How will the MPD Chief ensure that the growing influx of military funding, equipment, tactics and former personnel into our department not translate into an increasingly militarized police force?
In the long run, we believe it is these issues that will define our city – more so than fancy hotels, restaurants or farmers markets could ever do. Madison, Wisconsin, could be a national, urban model for promoting human rights – but
only if it has the moral fiber to do so.
Sincerely,
Community Response Team Members:
Erik Beach
Ali Brooks – CAPSW / Member of Groundwork
Kristin Forde
Greg Gelembiuk – Scientist, Doctoral Candidate, UW-Madison
Lorrie Hurckes – Community Nonprofit Leader
Marina Kelly – Artist / Educator
Rob Kennedy
Brenda Konkel
Jeffrey Lewis – Educator
Amelia Royko Maurer – Human Rights Activist / Musician
Nathan Royko Maurer – Human Rights Activist / Photographer
Gigi Royko Maurer – Idealist
OmaVic McMurray – Family Childcare Provider
Amy Miller
Kevin O’Malley – Father
Marlene Person
Eric Schechter
Wendy Schneider – Musician / Filmmaker
Craig Spaulding
Stephanie Steigerwald
Stephanie Rearick – Neighbor / Activist
Caroline Werner – MSW Senior Volunteer
Mark Whitcomb – Music and Media Producer
CRT Members Who Wish to Remain Anonymous
If you are truly a “community response team”, what are you doing to help the community strengthen themselves? Making a bunch on demands on the PD seems like treating the symptom without addressing the problem. Will you be providing counseling and other services to single family households to compensate for lack parental oversight at home? Will you be providing tutors to school kids who genuinley want to suceed but whose parents cant help because of their work schedule? Will you provide after school services or transportation to things like Boys and Girls club? Will you provide classes on proper nutrtition for families and help them gain access to grocer stores? will you provide peer educational sessions on the dangers of abusing drugs and alcohol? Or are you just going to blame PD for not filling the roles of the social workers, psychologists, drug counselors and parents that these kids are missing in their lives. leading this community to believe that changing police policies will somehow lead them to be more successful in life is incredibly naive and creates really damaging false hope and expectations. If you want to help, why not actually doing something that will make a real difference in their lives?
Because it’s not their goal.
Help is already happening thanks to the Southwest Partnership:
http://swmadison.org/current-work-groups/
Now that we have established that fact, can we next consider how changes to the MPD might also be of assistance?
That’s great that there is a group on the SW side helping people (even though neither of these shootings referenced happened there). And far be it for me to tell others what to do with their spare time. My point is that I think efforts would be much more effective in helping to educate people against the use/abuse of alcohol and illegal drugs than trying to convince cops that they should behave more cautiously while being attacked by people under the influence.
Neither Paul Heenan nor Tony Robinson were shot because of their race, socio-economic background, or the neighborhood they were in. They were not shot by blood-thirsty militarized police storm troopers looking to kill somebody. They both got shot because they were under the influence of drugs which led them to act in ways that normal, sane people would not (and most likely they themselves would not while sober). In both instances, these officers were not out looking for trouble, they were responding to 911 calls for help by citizens they are charged with protecting. If we ignore those facts we are doomed to keep repeating this story over and over while at the same time ruining the lives of grieving family members and police that are putting themselves in harms way.
I am a progressive, liberal democrat who has experienced suffering from violent crime. When police hesitate, victims get hurt. I just wish people would focus on “metaphorically” taking the keys away from the drunk driver before they get in the car, rather than blaming the tree they hit for killing their passenger.
September 8, 2012 (61 days before Heimsness killed Heenan)
“i should’ve blasted that guy with the knife through my window the other day. At least I would have got the weekend off.”
*
September 8, 2012 (61 days before Heimsness killed Heenan)
“i better go in. it’s getting light out and all these people will soon be able to see the raging contempt on my face”
*
September 9, 2012 (60 days before Heimsness killed Heenan)
“i’m ready to go on a shooting spree up in dispatch”
*
October 5, 2012 (35 days before Heimsness killed Heenan)
“jesus i’m glad i took tomorrow off”
“i’m going to kill somebody, Dispatchers, coworkers, whoever”
*
November 7, 2012 (2 days before Heimsness killed Heenan)
“i’m a hater”
“one of these days i’m going to snap and start screaming”
“WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
*
November 9, 2012 (2 hours before Heimsness killed Heenan)
“i’m the right guy for the wrong job”
“no witnesses, no problem”
Thou shalt not question the human nature within the police department because white men fear the boogie man
“Neither Paul Heenan nor Tony Robinson were shot because of their race, socio-economic background, or the neighborhood they were in”
Ahh, but you can’t really prove why Tony Robinson was shot, can you? You can only cite that he was shot and the reason given by the officer. But had Tony Robinson looked white, can you prove he would have been just as likely to be shot? You might want to research “implicit bias” before you answer that question:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/biases-back-mind-affect-feel-race/
In other words, Logan is saying “prove the officer was not a racist.” That’s the way these people roll, smk.
Indeed, that is exactly what I am requesting, because smk’s comment claimed Tony Robinson was not shot because of his race. Am I not allowed to request proof of smk’s assertion? That’s the way I roll – show me the proof!
Proof of smk’s assertion? Did you miss D.A. Ismael Ozanne’s press conference? If there was a civil rights violation, don’t you think he would have said so? Or that the Justice Dept would get involved? Now, your turn, Logan.
The D.A’s press conference was about whether charges would be pressed against Kenney based on applicable law – according to Ozanne, the applicable laws are intended to give good officers the benefit of the doubt when they must defend themselves.
That is a far, far different test than SMK’s assertion that “Tony Robinson was not shot because of his race socio-economic background, or neighborhood”
We know for a fact that the average American is more likely to shoot a black man than a white man in identical circumstances ( as the link I provided clearly demonstrates), and therefore it is possible that had Robinson been white, he would have received the benefit of the doubt where Robinson did not.
This leap of logic is the failure behind the difference in how conservatives and the YGB view the events.
Conservatives should be well aware of this kind of threshold of proof argument, since they employed it during the discussions of voter ID. The mere possibility of fraud, detectable and documented or not, was a sound basis for a conservative to support stronger voter ID requirements, regardless of the costs in terms of potential vote suppression.
Why is it so difficult to see the same principle is at play in a shoot/don’t-shoot decision, where it is difficult to detect whether a particular shooting decision was influenced by race?
Thanks for teeing this one up for me. The courts have upheld voter I.D. (http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/23/us-usa-court-election-idUSKBN0MJ1DZ20150323) National statistics have no bearing on whether a particular individual was shot because of his race. Just ask the supporters of Paul Heenan, a white man who also made foolish, life-threatening decisions. (BTW: your link proves no such assertion.)
“National statistics have no bearing on whether a particular individual was shot because of his race”
But those statistics do raise concerns about the equity of the system. Are people of color not entitled to equal justice?
And while national studies uphold Voter ID as not a violation of law or constitution, that does not prove the system is equitable.
But do you see how you missed the larger point? The White Conservative majority at the state level chose a very liberal threshold when the question of preventing voter fraud was before them (when evidence of black vote suppression exists), and are choosing a very conservative threshold when the question of equal justice for black males is before them.
These different thresholds are where white privilege is being asserted today in Wisconsin. In any question of policy, the concerns of white conservatives are taking precedence over the concerns of the community of color. And now, this is where we establish whether you are a racist: will you choose to continue to ignore your bias now that I have revealed its consequences to you?
You have not made the case that people of color have not received equal justice. Because more are arrested and incarcerated is not evidence of disproportion to the commission of crime. As to Voter I.D., you have yet to present a national study proving discrimination; meanwhile, courts have upheld Voter I.D. What is racist, Logan, is your assertion that people of color are unable to obtain a free I.D.
This, Logan, is where we establish that you are, indeed, a racist clown.
“You have not made the case that people of color have not received equal justice. ”
Yes, and neither did the GOP make the case that Voter Fraud was actually occurring. That didn’t stop them from ramming though Voter ID. In fact, I clearly remember Senator Darling stating that it really didn’t matter what the facts were – the mere possibility of fraud was enough to warrant requiring IDs.
“Because more are arrested and incarcerated is not evidence of disproportion to the commission of crime.”
Did you bother to research “implicit bias” yet? That’s my argument here, not what you brought up.
“As to Voter I.D., you have yet to present a national study proving discrimination;”
Ahh, but the judge did agree that the imposition of voter ID would create barriers for less affluent residents of Milwaukee.
“What is racist, Logan, is your assertion that people of color are unable to obtain a free I.D.”
My assertion comes from the groups point that the judge agreed with. I am simply passing on the information.
So am I correct that you have deliberately chosen to ignore the point I brought up about there being a double-standard depending on whether the issue in question was concerning to white conservatives? You are clearly demonstrating it in your evasiveness, but are you aware that you are doing it?
The great thing about “implicit bias” — at least from your standpoint — is that it is inherently unprovable. You just have to take it on faith. In any event, the courts have consistently upheld Voter I.D. — the law in all but 17 states. In other words, you’ve lost the argument. Your bias that people of color cannot obtain a free I.D., on the other hand, on the other hand, is explicit.
Implicit bias can be measured in individuals. Have you checked out the link I posted yet?
The courts upholding voter ID proves nothing relevant to this discussion except there is no law against making law based on unprovable fears of fraud. So I guess we could also make a law based on unprobable fears of bias and that would hold up in court too – what would that prove?
You might want to read the Circuit Court Judge’s initial decision saying the voter ID law for background on the effect of requiring people to get an id.
So the best part of this discussion is that through all of your irrascableness, SMK’s assertion about there being no racial bias in Tony Robinson’s killing remains unsubstantiated. Demand all the proof from me for anything else under the sun, but at the end of the day, SMK’s point fails.
Where did the district attorney present a finding of racial bias in the death of Tony Robinson? Your assertion that there was “remains unsubstantiated.” BTW: your race card expired years ago, is not renewable and has no purchasing power.
The author of this article compared the Heenan shooting to the Robinson shooting. If the Community Response team is saying they are similar, it completely negates your argument that Tony was killed because of implicit bias because you cant apply the same logic to the Heenan killing. Heenan was white, therefore no implicit racial bias. There is only one thing that the 2 shootings had in common, the inebriation of the deceased.
Your attempt to bring voter ID into the conversation is another deflection. And stop calling me conservative, I am not. I am just a crtical thinker.
Its also possible that had Tony Robinson not taken mushrooms and had the cops called on him for his behavior, Officer Kenney would not have shot him. It is much more likely that he would not have been shot if he was sober, rather than being white as evidenced by the Heenan case refernced above.
I dont have to prove Officer Kenney wasnt a racist to argue my point because its inconsequential to my analysis or the DA’s findings. Even if Officer Kenney was the reddest necked racist in Madison (which i absolutey dont believe and there is no evidence of) he would have had no opportunity to shoot Tony had he not been called to the scene responding to a distress call. That is my point.
“Where did the district attorney present a finding of racial bias in the death of Tony Robinson? ”
That was never the task of the DA – so why is that relevant?
“If the Community Response team is saying they are similar, it completely negates your argument that Tony was killed because of implicit bias because you cant apply the same logic to the Heenan killing.”
But I’m not saying he was killed due to racial bias, I am saying you can’t prove he was not.
Well then, you should have been more clear that you were admonishing people not to get into situations where an officer’s implicit bias might be exposed.